“Crypton’s Hatsune Miku is an amazingly unique, inspiring and successful example of how sharing pulls together in community to empowers and explosion of creativity. It’s one of my favorite projects. I’m so excited that Creative Commons can now be part of that story.”–Joi Ito, Creative Commons board member, Director at the MIT Media Lab

Hatsune Miku is the first and most famous virtual singer. What sets Miku apart from other “characters” is the original “remix-free” license for users. Since her debut in 2007, Miku have been remixed and cherished by fans, resulting in 170,000+ videos on YouTube, 95,000 songs, and 500,000+ artworks created by the community.

Hatsune Miku also played the major role at TOYOTA USA and Google Chrome TV commercials. She has performed sold-out shows with 3D images not only in Japan, but also in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore. To deal with growing demands from the world, Crypton Future Media Inc., which gave a birth to Hatsune Miku and owes her character, has decided to adopt the CC BY-NC license on December 14th.

“The creative culture using Hatsune Miku and related community will spread worldwide by applying a CC license to the illustration of Hatsune Miku. I hope that this encourages cross-border collaborations among creators and enables them to deepen their understanding of each other’s culture and respect to creators through their works and creation.”–Hiroyuki Ito, CEO of Crypton Future Media, Inc.

]]>http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/35879/feed6Japan relief efforts use Creative Commonshttp://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26861
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26861#commentsTue, 22 Mar 2011 18:23:31 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=26861Last week we asked you to help support the Japanese relief effort. We would also like to highlight alternative ways you can help by pointing you to a few relief efforts that are using CC licenses.

Music compilations where 100% of proceeds are donated to Red Cross and other charities
Two projects are calling for net musicians to submit their music, graphic design, video, and photography for compilations where all proceeds will be donated to charitable organizations helping Japan, like the Red Cross. InternetLabel is calling for music submissions by April 1st and for art submissions by April 11. The InternetLabel compilation will be released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Impurfekt, which is focusing specifically on art influenced by Japanese culture, is calling for submissions by April 15. The Impurfekt compilation will be released under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Google Person Finder
Although it doesn’t use CC, the Google Person Finder is an open source Google app that was developed in response to the Haiti earthquake and that has been adapted for the missing person database for Japan. You can use the Google Person Finder to search for loved ones, and find out more about how it works here.